LEGO Rock Raiders

Share.

Strategy without the action, or

By IGN Staff

Poor rock raiders. While their other LEGO cousins are busy living in big houses, driving in yachts, and taking rides on plastic trains while smelling polyurethane flowers, they're eternally struggling to exist, always looking for that next piece of ore, the bigger, better energy crystal. This time around, they've entered into an asteroid field hiding a wormhole -- sending them into a distant galaxy with a damaged ship. The only solution is to explore an alien world in search of the precious crystals that they need to get back home. Like most strategy games, the gameplay is mission based, which means that you'll be thrust into a variety of situations throughout your adventures, everything from rescuing a lost crew member to finding your base, which has been hidden behind fallen rubble. If you're looking for battles, you aren't going to find it here. This is all about the building, which isn't that surprising, considering the license involved. But any of you hoping for a block-based Command & Conquer will be sorely dissapointed.

You begin every mission with a tool store that you can use to transport raiders to the surface, and construct power pads and the other buildings you'll need to beat a specific mission. You've got an unlimited supply of rock raiders, but as you begin to train specific units, you'll want to keep the general foot traffic to a minimum. It'll help you find your important units, and on levels with limited oxygen, it will also help you avoid needless consumption. Though you can name your trained raiders, you can't call them with a hotkey or a menu, which means that you'll be stuck clicking around until you find the one unit you're looking for. In fact, you quickly learn that even the units are unimportant, as you can always re-train them if necessary in a mission. You actually don't control your units directly -- rather, you give them suggestions, and hope that they'll actually go through with your commands. If you'd like a set of walls drilled, for instance, you simply select them, and someone will come and begin drilling. It takes out the micro-management, but adds a certain frustration factor, particularly when you're trying to get a unit to do something specific and it decides to disobey you completely.

Once you've transported your units to the surface, you'll need to immediately begin drilling walls. Only certain walls are drillable, though as you gain skills and vehicles, you'll gain access to tools that will help you take on the denser walls in your way. Your units will automatically pick up ore and crystals and bring them back to the tool store, or use them to build a structure. You'll have to lay down a power pad first, then your buildings, but the odd thing about the process is that you won't actually be able to specify the direction of your building in relation to the pad. Though it sounds superficial, I've actually been trapped in missions when I constructed a power station, only to have it fail to provide power because the power pads were mysteriously not connected correctly. The designers meant the process to be simple, but in fact it ends up turning the whole process into an annoying game of guesswork -- one which unfortunately, you'll find yourself losing more often than not.

As you train your workers they'll gain extra abilities such as explosive or piloting skills, which are key to beating a level. If a raider becomes too damaged, they'll automatically be transported back to HQ, which is a nice way of saying bye-bye to your skilled player for good. There's an easy solution -- transport them to HQ manually before they get too damaged, and you can transport them back a second later at full health. It's a little ridiculous, but you'll be doing it quite a lot in later levels, especially when their frustrating AI causes them to continually dig under falling rocks. Rock raiders, it seems, are workaholics, and worse still, nihilistic. If you don't watch them carefully, they'll find some way to off themselves quicker than you can say "where's the plastic?"

Like most strategy games, you'll need to build specific sets of buildings and upgrade them in order to gain access to special vehicles and structures. Rock Raiders refines this process into its core elements, and in the process, loses any piece of entertainment value that was left in the process. Many units do little other than to provide access to vehicle X, and worse still, most missions are beaten by constructing a specific structure to do an incredible simple task. A search and rescue mission, for instance, has you constructing, a support station to provide oxygen to the area, a geological center, and a full set of upgrades in order to gain access to one vehicle that you'll need to find a lost raider in a cave. Most of the levels are 90% construction for 10% action, and once you've got over the nice look and feel of the game, you'll quickly realize how horribly wrong that ratio really is. You'll be spending a lot of time waiting for your raiders to bring the right amount of ore and crystals to build your next unit, just so you can bring more ore to build the next unit, and so on. When the action does come (which in Rock Raiders, is in the form of monsters), it's a matter of making sure that some of your units have weapons in their inventory, and pressing the "action stations" button. That's it. The AI takes care of itself, the monster leaves, and you're... back to drilling. Maybe you'll have a vehicle to help you, maybe you'll have some dynamite, but in the end, all roads lead back to drilling, and worse yet, walking those chunks of rock back to your base.

Kids will definitely get a kick out of seeing their favorite Rock Raider vehicles and buildings in a computer game, but they won't get much mileage out of them. In fact, you rarely get to spend much time with your vehicles. That's really the problem with the entire game -- everything is hidden behind a display case, promising you action and adventure with interesting options, vehicles, and characters, but never delivering anything when it comes down to gameplay. The AI takes care of the beasties with a click of a button, and the only thing you'll have to ever worry about in terms of beating a mission is whether or not you can get the ore to your base fast enough. And some of the ideas just don't seem fleshed out, like the sandwich concept. You have to keep track of how hungry your raiders are, and get them to eat when necessary, but honestly, it never seems to impact how they actually work in any way. And the one saving grace, the speed feature that would speed up the more boring aspects of gameplay, was under the spell of a funky bug that would undo any speed changes in the option screen.

Visually the game is pure LEGO, from the opening movies to the little blocky feet of the characters that wander around endlessly building, eternally digging. It's a tough job to be a Rock Raider, let me tell you. The textures are repeated fairly often, but have a nice, clean look. It's the buildings that will really charm you, though. The animations of the characters and buildings are smooth and deliver what counts. When you construct a new building, it pieces itself together LEGO-style in a nice sparkly way, and when the rock raiders sweep, dig, drill and drive, it's exactly as you'd expect animated hunks of plastic to look. If plastic was supernaturally animated to perform excavation-type tasks, that is. The sounds, though simple, are never dull, and the things that matter are right on the mark, like the crunching sounds of rocks rumbling and tumbling.

The LEGO charm is thick in Rock Raiders, but it's not even near enough to make it worth playing through this macro-management clunker. Kids may be enchanted by the clickability of the LEGO world, but anyone else will find themselves wishing for more.

8.5PresentationThe menu system is hot hot (moving movies behind the options screen!), and the option screens are simple and to the point.

8GraphicsThough the levels have a very flat look, the textures are nice, and the animations are addictive, especially watching your minions attack monsters.

7SoundThe voices are humorous, and the music is simple but fun -- but nothing to write home about.

5.5GameplayControlling your rock raiders can be frustrating, and putting together your buildings can be a messy mess mess. Too often (AKA, all the time) you're trapped in tedious resource gathering.

5.5Lasting AppealThere's a nice selection of missions, but most of them tread very similar territory. You can go back for better scores, but there isn't much incentive in terms of gameplay to warrant repeated plays.